Mod 1 Reflection

Scientific writing is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I'd say the most challenging part was figuring out how to be both concise and informative. At the beginning of the module, I was definitely under the impression that being informative meant word-vomiting everything I had learned onto a piece of paper. Quickly learned that was not what being informative meant, at all. I think that this has improved my scientific communications skills.

I also think that the data summary draft was a good way for me to get a better sense of how to understand the significance (or insignificance...looking at you, DSF assay) of particular scientific results. For example, when we were writing the background section of the draft, it was very interesting to see just how much research has been done on FKBP12 already. This made it difficult to talk about the significance of our findings, because we had to be careful not to make sweeping generalizations about the current literature on FKBP12. I imagine that if we were really publishing a paper, it would be super embarrassing to claim to have discovered a totally new molecule, only to realize the same thing had been done 10 years ago. This definitely helped me understand why scientific papers seem to understate the impact of their results sometimes - better safe than sorry! All in all, writing about the significance of the results, while challenging, did help me learn more about how to understand the big-picture implications of experiments.

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